Harrison's Reports (1946)

November 30, 1946 191 "The Yearling" with Gregory Peck, Jane Wyman and Claude Jarman, Jr. (MGM, no release date set; time, 134 min.) Excellent mass entertainment; it is a great picture, both as to production and entertainment values. Based on M..rjorie Kinnan Rawlings' Pulitzer prize novel, its simple but heart-warming story about a pioneer family's struggle for existence, and about the love of an eleven-year-old boy for a fawn, emerges as a powerful human-interest drama, one that constantly plays on the emotions. Its emotional appeal is so intense that even the most hardened picture-goer will be moved. The readers of the novel should be thrilled, for the casting is expert and the characters appear just as one imagined them. The beauty and charm of the picture lies not only in the story but also in the characters, whose simplicity and courage are a source of inspiration. The family, consisting of father (Gregory Peck), mother (Jane Wyman), and son (Claude Jarman, Jr.), has been directed by Clarence Brown with such keen understanding and sympathy that the audience feels affection for them and shares in their joys, as well as in the heart-breaking set-backs they suffer. The performances are uniformly flawless. Peck, as the father, is inspiringly courageous in his struggle against storms that ruin his crops, and against wild animals that kill his livestock. And the tenderness of the comradeship and understanding between his son and himself is something fine to see. Jane Wyman, as the mother, turns in a performance that will undoubtedly place her among the Academy Award contenders. Despite her stoical forbearance, she conveys to the spectator, by finely shaded facial expressions, the sufferings of a woman who had lived a life of drudgery and selfdenial but who was extremely proud. Special mention must be made of Claude Jarman, Jr., a newcomer, who plays the son; his naturalness and charm, and his amazing ability to convey all types of boyish emotions, should win him praise from all. Superbly photographed in Technicolor against a background of wildly beautiful Florida scrub country, where the family lived in a wilderness clearing, the picture is unsurpassed in its pictorial beauty. One sequence, in which father and son, accompanied by hunting dogs, track down a vicious bear, is extremely exciting. The fight between the bear and the dogs is so savage that those with weak stomachs will turn their eyes away from the screen. Conversely, they will get keen pleasure out of the poetically beautiful sequences in which the youngster runs and romps with the deer. The story, which takes place shortly after the Civil War, tells of the family's hand-to-mouth existence on their meagre earnings from the soil, and of Pack's hope to raise a "money crop" that would enable him to build a well outside his door, thus lightening his wife's burden. Their son, the only one of four children to have survived the rigors of pioneer life, begs for a pet to relieve the loneliness of his solitary boyhood, but the mother denies the request lest the pet put a further drain on the family's limited resources. When Peck, bitten by a rattlesnake, hurriedly kills a doe and uses its heart and liver to draw out the poison, the boy, on whom the care of the crops now depended, is permitted to adopt the doe's orphaned fawn as his pet. Claude is completely happy with the fawn, but as it grows into yearling the animal becomes a great liability because of the damage he does to the crops. The yearling's destructiveness eventually threatens the family's very existence, compelling Peck to order the boy to shoot the animal. Unable to kill his pet, Claude turns the yearling loose in the scrub, but the animal soon returns to the farm, and the mother, of necessity, shoots and wounds him. Claude, heartbroken, is compelled to put the yearling out of its misery. Embittered, he runs away from home, but he returns after three days of starvation and hardships, more matured and fully cognizant that necessity, not viciousness, motivated his parents in demanding that he dispose of the yearling. Paul Osborn wrote the screen play, and Sidney Franklin produced it. The cast includes Chill Wills, Clem Bevans, Henry Travers, Forrest Tucker and many others. "The Secret Heart" with Walter Pidgeon, Claudette Colbert and June Allyson (MGM, no release date set; time, 97 mm.) Just a fair drama, which, by virtue of its star values, may do better than average business. It is chiefly a woman's picture, for the story revolves around a young widow who sacrifices her own love and happiness to devote herself to the upbringing of her two step-children, keeping from them the knowledge that their father, a suicide, was a thief. Worked into the plot is the adolescent love felt by the neurotic stepdaughter for the suitor of her widowed step mother. The basic ingredients of the story are good, but as presented the picture fails to strike a note of realism and the action is stagey. Moreover, the motivating factor behind the heroine's self-sacrifices is not clearly delineated. Claudette Colbert, as the widow, is sympathetic, but it is not enough to overcome the artificiality of the plot. Lionel Barrymore, as a psychiatrist, plays a very small part. Told partly in flashback, the story reveals how Claudette, prior to her marriage to Richard Derr, became attached to Walter Pidgeon, a close friend of Derr's, but her infatuation for Derr had been too strong to break. Her marriage to Derr, an accomplished pianist, had been unhappy because of his bitterness over being compelled to follow a banking career, and he had committed suidice after becoming involved in a bank swindle, leaving Claudette and his two children (June Allyson and Richard Sterling) under a stigma of disgrace. Claudette had declined Pidgeon's offer of marriage and, for ten years, had devoted herself to the children and to becoming a success in business in order to pay off Derr's debts. Sterling, grown to manhood, adored and respected Claudette, but June, who had inherited her father's neurotic nature, could not bring herself to love her stepmother because of a belief that she had in some way been responsible for her father's death. (She had never learned about his suicide or the scandal.) In the course of events, Sterling obtains employment in Pidgeon's shipyard, thus renewing Pidgeon's acquaintance with the family and awakening his love for Claudette. June develops an adolescent "crush" on Pidgeon and misunderstands his fatherly interest in her. Meanwhile Sterling, in an effort to shock June out of her psycopathic state, tells her the truth about their father. This information, coupled with the realization that Pidgeon loved Claudette, drives June to attempt suicide like her father. Claudette saves the girl as she is about to fling herself off a cliff, and, through warm understanding and sympathy, brings her back to normalcy. It all ends with June finding romance with a boy her own age, and with Claudette finally yielding to Pidgeon's proposals. Whitfield Cook and Anne Morrison Chapin wrote the screen play from a story by Rose Franken and William B. Meloney. Edwin H. Knopf produced it, and Robert Z. Leonard directed it. The cast includes Marshall Thompson, Elizabeth Patterson, Patricia Medina and others. Unobjectionable morally. "Wake Up and Dream" with June Haver and John Payne (20th Century-Fox, no release date set; time, 92 min.) Based on the novel "Enchanted Voyage," which was a delightful, whimsical tale about an old man who dreamt of the sea and built a sailboat on wheels, this screen version emerges as a curious admixture of fantasy, whimsy, re mance and music, which is so slow-moving and so confusingly jumbled that one loses interest in it long before the final reel; it all adds up to a dull hodge-podge of nonsense, photographed in Technicolor. Considerable changes have been made in the story, which now has as its theme a little girl's faith that she would find her brother, reported missing in action. But an inept script , uninspired direction, and dialogue that is over-abundant and insipid, prove too much of a handicap for every one of the players. The story's central characters are Connie Marshall, a little girl, whose farmer-brother (John Payne) had joined the navy, leaving her in charge of a relative; June Haver, a waitress, who was Payne's sweetheart; and Clem Bevans, an old carpenter, who had built a sailboat in his backyard, 300 miles from the sea. Connie runs away from her relatives and seeks refuge aboard Bevan's boat, where she is cared for by June. A fierce storm knocks the boat loose from its land moorings, causing it to sail down a highway road with all three aboard. Believing Bevan's tall tales about his conquests of the sea, Connie persuades him to set out in the home-made boat to find a mythical island on which she believed her missing brother would be found. The rest of the story concerns itself with how the trio make their way from Maine to the Louisiana bayous via inland waterways, becoming grounded in a swamp, where they are eventually found and rescued by Payne, who allows Connie to think that she had found him. Obviously, this "strange" voyage was meant to give the picture its appeal, but the trio's adventures en route, during which they pick up a roving dentist and become chummy with a daffy hermit, are too ludicrous to be funny and too dull to be interesting. Elick Moll wrote the screen play, Walter Morosco produced it, and Lloyd Bacon directed it. The cast includes Charlotte Greenwood, John Ireland, and others. Unobjectionable morally.